Brown's Daily Word 11-12-09

Good Morning,
Praise the Lord for this new day. Our grandchildren who live in Boston, live just a brisk 2 minute walk from the train station. They love to ride train. They are train savvy. I saw on the news yesterday a story about a woman who was drunk, standing on the platform in Boston, waiting for the train. She was very close the edge of the platform, and she fell on the track in front a on coming train. There were some caring passengers who stood on the edge of the platform waived frantically towards the oncoming train. It was a miracle that the train stopped just inches from hitting the woman who had fallen on the track. The fellow passengers did not jump to the tracks to retrieve the fallen passenger, they just waived at the oncoming train.
Presbyterian biblical scholar/ minister/author Carl Howie tells about an incident that took place in a New York subway on a wintry, and especially cold and bitter, night. Very few people were on the subway at that hour. At each station, the train would screech to a halt, open its doors, allowing a few people to come and go. At one station, a peculiar woman got on. Her clothes were ragged and dirty. She was either extremely tired or extremely drunk. As the train lurched forward, she stumbled and fell into a seat and was almost instantly fast asleep. Through the screeching and swaying of the train, she slept, her hands nestled inside two tattered worn-out gloves. It was hard to see how those gloves, full of holes, would help at all. How could she go anywhere in that bitter cold without freezing her hands? Few people in the train could take their eyes off this homeless person, asleep on the subway, her gloved hands without gloves.
Then a strange thing happened. A young Puerto Rican boy got up to get off the train as it slowed to a stop. He could have gone out the exit closest to him, but he went by the sleeping woman instead. He paused by her for a few moments, removed his gloves, laid them on her lap, and got off the train.
It is easy to judge everyone around us. After all we all have plenty of faults. Deliberate choosing to see everyone as an object of God's love in Jesus Christ, created in His image, will help me look past the homelessness, age, beauty, intelligence, opinions, the differences between myself and others. Really looking at God's children and really seeing them I can be more compassionate. I can be better responsive to needs and less responsive to my judgmental prejudices.
We live in an incredibly selfish world. Even if we can look past or lay aside the judmentalism and anger we see in the world today, there is still an overwhelming sense of self-serving that is impossible to reconcile with Christian teaching.
Unfortunately, the self-centeredness that we see in the world at large is also present in our church congregations. For many today, there is a shopping mall mentality. We all know that consumers shop at the place where they can get the most services and goods for the least amount of money and with the greatest ease. It is the philosophy of Walmart…but not of the Bride of Christ!


Galatians 5:16-18 (The Message): "My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?"
In Christ,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2IpLSfqp8